Description

‘Marvelous: exceptionally vivid, real, and true’ – Colm Toibin, author of Long Island
‘Fundamentally about the beauty of life’ – Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam
‘Exquisite. Utterly mesmerizing’ – Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
‘A fierce beautiful novel’ – Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater

A medical crisis brings one man close to death – and to love, art, and beauty – in a profound and luminous novel by award-winning author Garth Greenwell.

A poet’s life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind.

This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value – art, memory, poetry, music, care – are thrown into sharp relief. Time expands and contracts. Sudden intimacies bloom. Small Rain surges beyond the hospital to encompass a radiant vision of human life: our shared vulnerability, the limits and possibilities of sympathy, the ideal of art and the fragile dream of America. Above all, this is a love story of the most unexpected kind.

‘A classic, a dawn serenade, a little miracle of exigent joy. I’ll be rereading it the rest of my life’ – Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

Publisher Review

Small Rain is a marvelous novel: exceptionally vivid, real, and true. Garth Greenwell’s sensibility is rich and generous – the narrator’s memories are haunting, and his experiences of both illness and love are deeply affecting. You are in the room with him. This is a true achievement, written with engaged humanity and a great command of style. — Colm Toibin, author of Long Island A fierce, beautiful novel about loving, living, dying, caring and being cared for. Greenwell’s sentences crackle with contained energy. — Sarah Moss, author of Summerwater Greenwell writes with exquisite precision about pain and loss – but his novel is equally a meditation on joy, beauty, and above all, love. Small Rain is a triumph, one of the most deeply moving books I have read in a long time. — Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies Greenwell writes tenderly about what it is to be subject to the crises of the body. Small Rain is a document of searching, an interrogation of love, care, and time, daring in its refusal to be abstract about the concrete facts of life and death. — Raven Leilani, author of Luster Small Rain is a marvel, one of America’s greatest writers working at the top of his game, moving into new territory with force and grace and wisdom and overwhelming beauty. — Phil Klay, author of Redeployment I’ve never read anything that so vividly captures the helplessness of a hospital stay. Greenwell weaves moments of clear-eyed misanthropy into a novel that is fundamentally about the beauty of life. Small Rain is claustrophobic, terrifying, soaringly philosophic. It will make you notice that you are alive, which is maybe the most important thing a book can do. — Alice Winn, author of In Memoriam An exquisitely human novel which confronts death and meets it with poetry, art and love . . . An utter triumph of expression. * The Bookseller * I just didn’t put it down . . . very romantic, incredibly moving — Miranda July Tantalizing . . . Greenwell – such a finely tuned, generous writer – transforms a savage illness into a meditation on a vital life. — Kirkus Reviews, starred review Virtuosic . . . cathartic and unforgettable. It’s a luminous departure from Greenwell’s spare and erotic earlier work — Publishers Weekly, starred review There’s an unshowy genius to Garth Greenwell’s prose that feels genuinely peerless among contemporary American novelists . . . Small Rain is a classic, a dawn serenade, a little miracle of exigent joy. I’ll be rereading it the rest of my life. — Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!